The Brontë Sisters: How Emily, Charlotte & Anne Changed The World

charlotte sisters

Anne Brontë’s novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), exhibited her distinct writing style and explored unconventional themes for the Victorian era. Agnes Grey draws from Anne’s own experiences as a governess, shedding light on the mistreatment and social inequalities faced by women in such positions – establishing it as an important feminist work. Emily’s death deeply affected Anne, who was herself battling declining health from influenza and advanced tuberculosis. Anne accepted the news that she had little chance of recovery with characteristic resolve.

What were Charlotte Brontë’s siblings’ names?

Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls, but in 1855 passed away while pregnant with their first child. At the time it was thought tuberculosis caused her death, but modern opinions differ. In 1857, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell wrote a biography of Charlotte entitled The Life of Charlotte Brontë.

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The novel is a sharp critique of the upper-class society and the treatment of governesses. It exposes the inequalities of Victorian society through the disgraceful behavior of Agnes’s charges and their indifference towards their less privileged governess. Amid these trials, Agnes finds solace in nature and the local curate, Edward Weston, with whom she eventually finds love. “Agnes Grey” is a testament to Anne Brontë’s astute observations of societal norms and the oppressive conditions for women in her time.

Marriage and death

They took noms de plume Currer, Ellis, and Acton (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne respectively, and shared the faux surname Bell. While there, Charlotte fell in love with the married head of school, Constantin Héger. Charlotte had returned to school in her teens, after which she worked as a teacher and then as a governess. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne received little formal education after the Cowan’s Bridge school disaster. They, along with their brother Branwell, grew up creating an imaginary world called Angria.

In order to acquire the language skills which would attract pupils and secure the school’s success, Charlotte and Emily spent a year studying in Brussels, funded by their aunt. Charlotte spent almost two years being educated in Brussels, and there she fell in love with her teacher Monsieur Constantin Heger. After returning to her home Haworth, Charlotte wrote four letters to Heger confessing her love for the schoolmaster, who was already married. Heger’s wife later found them, pieced them back together, and published them after Charlotte’s death. When her brother Patrick was given some wooden soldiers as a gift in 1826, the siblings began to make up stories about the world that the soldiers lived in.

charlotte sisters

Having obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree, he was ordained on 10 August 1806.[10] He is the author of Cottage Poems (1811), The Rural Minstrel (1814), numerous pamphlets, several newspaper articles and various rural poems. In August 1824, Patrick sent Charlotte, Emily, Maria, and Elizabeth to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. Just a few days after little Louis was born, three-year-old Charlotte melted hearts across the world in newly released pictures which showed her tending to the newborn. The photos, shared by Kensington Palace on social media, were taken by their proud mum Kate and celebrate Louis's birth as well as his big sister's third birthday.

charlotte sisters

Cowan Bridge School

Branwell Brontë’s persistent alcoholism had masked his deteriorating health, and he died on 24 September 1848, aged 31 (likely from tuberculosis). The family suffered further illnesses that winter, and Emily died on 19 December, aged 30. Subsequently, Anne’s Agnes Grey, was published in December 1847 – the same time as Emily’s Wuthering Heights.

In society

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Brontë held lifelong correspondence with her former schoolmate Ellen Nussey. Brontë's friendship with Elizabeth Gaskell, while not particularly close, was significant in that Gaskell wrote the first biography of Brontë after her death in 1855.

In 1852, she attracted the attention of a man ironically named Arthur Bell Nichols, who began to court her despite her father’s objections. Nicholls continued to press his suit and the two were finally married in 1854. After a month’s honeymoon in Ireland, the pair settled down in Haworth. The Brontë Parsonage Museum is managed and maintained by the Brontë Society,[147] which organises exhibitions and takes care of the cultural heritage represented by objects and documents that belonged to the family. The society has branches in Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries, South Africa and the USA. In her 1857 biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Mrs Gaskell begins with two explanatory and descriptive chapters.

Charlotte and Emily went to London to claim authorship by the sisters, and their identities were made public. A year and a half after the move to Haworth, Maria Brontë died, crying out continuously, “Oh God my poor children—oh God my poor children! ” Four years later, the two eldest, Maria and Elizabeth, died of consumption, contracted at a boarding school for the daughters of clergymen. These were indeed formative experiences in the lives of the remaining siblings, but the Brontë sisters did not automatically become the silent wraiths of Mrs. Gaskell’s imagination. They contracted “scribblemania,” and poured out an endless stream of prose and verse written in very small letters on tiny scraps of paper. Charlotte and Branwell collaborated on the creation of a fictional world known as Angria—and for a time, it seems, Branwell was the better writer.

After calming Emily, Charlotte, who as Barker explains “was the only one ambitious for fame,” convinced her sisters of the plan. While it’s clear that all of the Brontë children suffered from this rampant disease of the lungs, it’s difficult to assess what exactly killed each of them. Branwell’s illness was aggravated by his alcoholism and addiction to opium; Emily also suffered from yet another respiratory infection and from her stubborn refusal to allow doctors to treat her. Anne worked with the doctors, but wasted away, dying not quite six months after her sister. Charlotte was pregnant at the time of her death and suffered from either pneumonia, typhus, or hyperemesis gravidarum, an imbalance of salts, water, and minerals caused by extreme morning sickness.

Mrs. Gaskell considered them to be an ominous brown but, Barker points out, she had merely visited them at the wrong time of the year. And the Brontë parsonage itself is not quite the horrid pile she depicted but a late-eighteenth-century house of some elegance and charm. The view of the moors from its windows was splendid, and not one to incite any particularly grotesque associations. In 1844 Charlotte attempted to start a school that she had long envisaged in the parsonage itself, as her father’s failing sight precluded his being left alone. Prospectuses were issued, but no pupils were attracted to distant Haworth. Charlotte Brontë (born April 21, 1816, Thornton, Yorkshire, England—died March 31, 1855, Haworth, Yorkshire) was an English novelist noted for Jane Eyre (1847), a strong narrative of a woman in conflict with her natural desires and social condition.

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